08 November 2006 21:47
in the last couple weeks here in jamaica it's finally cooled off enough that i can leave the windows open at night.normally i run the air conditioning with a rich "i've got money to burn" attitude. my sleep is pretty important to me, so it's well worth the extra $$/month to keep the mosquitoes at bay. but lately i've been able to open the winders and enjoy a nice cross breeze through the night and listen to the morning rain pattering on the broad leaves outside.
so that's what i call acceptable self-indulgence [3]. after all, money was made to be spent, right?
i've met/read quite a number of people who vehemently oppose capitalism for its great injustices to society. i on the other hand have always been pro-capitalism. if i were to make an educated guess as to why i am pro-capitalism, i would say its out of massive ignorance and logical blindness. in other words, i've ignored the issue, or even avoided thinking about it to some degree.
the cause of that would be my stubborn insistence of clinging to the right of every american (citizen or immigrant) to live the american dream. to start from nothing and build up something worthwhile; be it a family, a name, a business, an edifice, or an ideal; to build it with nothing but blood, sweat, tears, an honest day's labor, and american inginooity. when i think of the pioneers who came to a new land and etched out a new lives for themselves, lives under their control, lives free from the tyranny of the european class system, lives where how far a man got in life was dependent on how hard he was willing to work for it--that's what i think of when i think of american capitalism.
who cares if my definition of capitalism doesn't match anybody else’s?
so what if the pioneers had to commit a little ethnic cleansing to obtain their "free" land? does it really matter that some computer geek who started a small software company is now muscling out the competition? and what's wrong with the fact that some random search engine company will accomplish world domination by 2015, with the puppet national leaders and the masses alike cowering before the unanswerable strength of the mysterious and lethal "google security forces"? (all depends on your definition of evil).
but even though walmarts pock our land and you wound up in a mental hospital thanks to that blasted paperclip of Gate's that sent you over the edge, the beauty of our system is that you can live your entire life without ever visiting a walmart. you don't even have to go to target or kmart or ames (wait, ames might be dead--capitalism only works for the strong). even though walmart killed (i mean, out-performed) thousands of mom & pop stores, there's still some sticking in there. it's even better in the software world. if microsoft wants to shoot itself in the foot by integrating their browser and charging people an arm and a leg to have their lives controlled by that blasted paperclip and "you must reboot" dialogues...more power to them. it's only a matter of time until people figure out that freeware is a good bit cheaper than plunking down $200 to waste a sizable chunk of you harddrive on an efficiency-proof OS. let me break that down for you. free < $200. just remember the knife cuts both ways...why buy disposable cars from detroit when you can buy practically permanent cars from japan?
historical note, i never approved of the lawsuit against the internet explorer bundling. in keeping with the mindset i've been advocating, i think the parties concerned should have battled it out in the marketplace rather than the courts. don't like what microsoft is selling? sell something better. criticizing microsoft for trying to keep the competitions fingers out of the pie is tantamount to telling north korea to quit building nukes (we'll save that particular discussion for later)--why on earth would they do that?
okay, now that i've made my point (i think i made it, albeit somewhat overbearingly); namely that i like the idea of everybody having a shot at throwing themselves into a work; and assuming we all agree that capitalism is better than communism (eg, walmart as the only store, and government run to boot); what does that leave us? (besides the really convoluted sentence i just wrote?)
i will readily conceed that capitalism as we have it leaves a lot of wreckage in its wake. once-proud shop owners are now working 50 hour weeks at the local supercenter for $8/hr. seven year old kids are working 16 hour days putting shoelaces on $120 nikes in guatemala. not only individuals, but entire national economies suffer in regions where social or cultural forces and traditions clash with the western (american) version of success (democracy/capitalism). my response to all the do-gooders whining about it?
tough.
(survival of the fittest ain't pretty for the non-fittest. get with it or get lost.)
okay, so maybe that particularly acidic rejoinder doesn't fall within the realm of acceptable Christian responses. in the previous draft to this i had a another five or so paragraphs where i continued in slapdash fashion to dig myself in pretty deep by trying to walk the very thin line of separation between love and sarcasm. one might argue that there's actually a substantial gap between a loving reply and a sarcastic reply, and that would indeed aide considerably in explaining why i found myself still digging after five paragraphs of attempted explanation. so i'll reign in my sarcastic enthusiasm and try a somewhat less inflammatory response.
for starters i tried to find out what exactly capitalism is. i know i use wikipedia extensively as a casual (and very easy) source of information, i fully realize it isn't the end all be all in reference information. disclaimers aside, i used wikipedia for 90% of my research and came up pretty murky on the whole thing. i did learn that capitalism is spelled with two 'a's instead of an 'a' and an 'o'. normally in neglect my spelling, but when i use a word in every paragraph, i should probably make some effort to get it right. we'll see if i can dig up a spell checker somewhere later. i also learned that there are a lot of isms loosely related to each other by way of being an economic system or general way of life or specific mode of living.
hedonism
capitalism
commercialism
socialism
materialism
communism
economic materialism
consumerism
productivism
now i didn't begin to wade through all of those, but skimmed through their introductory sections. it was enough to make me glad i picked a technical major in school instead of an abstract one like sociology. and since the capitalism article is of some length, i abandoned ship and was rescued at sea by dictionary.com. capitalism: an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.
that's better. it helps to put things in the correct perspective; privately owned vs state owned, small government vs big government, republican vs democrat, good vs evil [3]. at any rate, 'private ownership' is an understandable concept.
the result of any research i may or may not have done came down to this decision. that i don't think it's the best we can do, but it's the best we got at the moment. and like i mentioned, i didn't train to be a sociologist, but i'd guess that imposing a system that works well in the east on us would have just as many problems as imposing a system that works well in the western hemisphere on the east. cultural mindset is going to affect how any system works...and there will be growing pains along the way. ignoring whether the moral rights and wrongs, at the rate we're going the world at large will eventually get used to the western way of doing things. the orient in particular isn't slacking off in its rapid scaling of the economic ladders to out-perform western companies. if capitalism was unlearnable by the eastern hemisphere, then we'd never have been forced to learn the word 'outsource'.
but whether capitalism is good for others besides us, no doubt it's harder on some than it is on others. it's to be expected, the problems we have with capitalism on a small scale in the states will be the same problems we will have on a larger scale globally. i know the fight has often been depicted in the east as communism vs capitalism/democracy. i personally would rather have the latter, and it's oft-times hard for an individual to prefer one or the other and be able to speak out about it sort of defaults to the democracy side anyway, but if some people groups prefer communism or socialism or 1984, so be it. just don't make me have to live (suffer) under it. give me capitalism or give me death. or at least give me mounds of credit card debt. being well-clothed in an economic prison is better than being nigh to naked in an economic wasteland, right?
i just made that up off the top of my head, it's not supposed to make sense, though it's crystal clear to me. my analogies usually have more holes than something with a lot of holes, but at least my metaphors pack a mean punch. if i was truly sorry for that last sentence i'd apologize, but i'd hate to be insincere. suffice to say, i'll stick with capitalism as a whole until you give me something better. like a theocracy. or should i say The Theocracy?
i'm inserting a note of explanation here. wikipedia's article on the american dream was a lot different from the articles on isms in that it actually cleared some things up for me (i highly recommend reading it in full, although i would summarize the criticism section by pointing back to the inbalance mentioned in the historical background section. originally there was a wealth of unclaimed land/resources/opportunities that the crowded countries of the old world did not have. now there is still opportunity here, but the balance is not so drastically askew...leading to the "downfall" of the american dream). there was a lot i recognized as matching my own thoughts regarding the american dream, take for instance the definition (there's a concise definition from dictionary.com too):
The term is not easily defined, and has subjective meaning to many who claim it. The American Dream is often associated with immigration, as the dream of religious freedom, economic prosperity, and meritocracy has historically driven immigrants to the United States. The term is used by many modern Americans to signify success in life as a result of hard work (as in, "living [or pursuing] the American Dream").i'm afraid that in the beginning i was mixing my terms up, confusing capitalism and the american dream by mixing them up too much. while they are most definately intertwined and interdependent, they are still two distinctly separate concepts. i'll let the earlier comments stand, but add that the downsides of "big business" in capitalism have always been very visible. it just used to be that the sweatshops were in america, not in indonesia. is there a way to keep the entrepreneur spirit and individualism that capitalism extols but keep the big business specters at bay? while perhaps a noble idea, government limitations on business size and market shares are at their simplest a slap in the face of the american dream/ideal/individualism. who's the government (and by extension, the voting populace) to say who's too big? why should the government clamp down on microsoft or walmart (provided they're running an ethical show) simply because they've got a majority of the market share?
in the long run, i'm afraid we'll always run by one particular motto: money talks my friend, money talks. so until we get everybody on the love is not self-seeking page, i don't think there will ever be a globally accepted economic system that generates a pleasant utopia for all humanity. pretty depressing sure, but all the more reason to get hopping with the whole world-takeover plan we're supposed to have been working on for the last two thousand years or so.
now this was supposed to be a look at a detail in the realm of materialism, and my introductory paragraph was to mention capitalism. so in theory (ie, twisted theory), this is just the introduction.
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